‘Prince of Peace’ Series: Drowning in Despair

“For it is the God who said, “Light will shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.  For we who are living are always being handed over to death for Jesus’s sake, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us but life in you.”

2 Corinthians 4:6-12

Hope seems hard to come by these days. And even when it flashes in the pan, as it were, most folks I know seem to be left with a deep yearning for some kind of messianic deliverance every four years. I’m reminded of such yearning this past week as our country has inaugurated its 47th president while our 46th president leaves the White House. From my vantage point, it looks like a third of the country is full of optimism and celebration, one third is rattled by some combination of disbelief, rage, and grief, and another third has completely unplugged from national politics a long time ago.

Regardless of whether one seeks a new political messiah each election cycle or retreats into the shadows, what is interesting to me is how Americans seem to be operating in an all-or-nothing approach: either win at all costs or avoid the racket altogether. And I wonder to what degree both approaches are responding to the same cultural pressures and anxieties but in different ways. I’ve previously written about the American predicament, which is also the enduring predicament of all empires, that our collective decision to live by the sword will inevitably result in our collective death by the sword. However, it is my contention in this reflection that our culture is unsuccessfully reckoning with the fallout of a decaying empire and have taken to the proverbial sword, whether in global warmongering or school shootings, in attempts to deny our collective grief. Simply, we have become a hopeless culture lost in a sea of despair, and hopeless cultures cannot help but to collapse inward on themselves. 

Soren Kierkegaard writes in The Sickness Unto Death, "For the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unconscious of being despair." What I think Kierkegaard is trying to say is that the symptoms of despair manifest themselves subtly, as the causes of despair are often so deep and buried that they appear to be normal, natural even, to our lived experience. Much like conditioning a horse to wear a saddle, we don’t even notice the burden on our backs because we’ve been carrying it so long. Yet, the much more troubling question is this: how are we to be saved if we show no awareness of needing nor any interest in wanting to be saved? 

I'm constantly amazed at our collective ability to sense that something toxic has polluted the streams we find ourselves swimming in, but we are still hellbent on continuing to swim downstream as fast as we can. It's as if we have lost our capacity to believe our lives can be different, that our grief, loss, and discontent are the truest thing about being alive. Standing tall and proud with an unwavering denial that we could ever be a sick society, we march on toward our own demise.

In my experience, such stubborn denial is not the result of a moral failure, meaning that it doesn't stem from someone being a bad person. Rather, I've found denial to be the perfect intoxicant to avoid overwhelming grief and despair, which is actually what creates destructive patterns and behaviors. Perhaps the despair gripping our culture is similar to the anxiety we all experience in our nervous systems. Things are great so long as we find ways to bury the ugly truth from our consciousness. In this way, it is not so much that we cannot perceive our despair as much as it is that we do not want to give up the busyness, recreation, and distraction that our despair has driven us to.

A few months ago, I was diagnosed with a panic disorder, which essentially means my brain has learned to have anxiety about anxiety. Fun stuff, I know. For an already anxious person like me, this isn’t good news, especially given that panic attacks can bring on all sorts of somatic symptoms like fainting, tingling nerves, inability to eat and sleep, chest pain, and more. You truly feel like you are dying, but it turns out your brain is just threatened by intense anxiety. What I’ve learned though is that there are two ways to deal with my onsetting panic: I can let go of control and come to terms with the possibility that I might actually be dying or I can give my best efforts to distracting myself with happier thoughts or something more entertaining in that moment. Unfortunately, option number one takes a good deal of time and therapy to work through, so distraction is often my best bandaid. But the problem with bandaids are that they cannot heal what is wounded, only conceal it.

While pain and loss are universal, the distinctive characteristic about much of American pain and loss seems to be our ability to buy, consume, and isolate ourselves into believing that our despair is simply another economic investment. In other words, our despair is yet another opportunity to justify, capitalize, and yield more profit for ourselves, our tribes, our political parties, and our ideologies. A culture perpetually in distraction is also a culture perpetually in despair, and tragically, the only times we seem to be able to even glimpse our collective despair is when another massacre targeting kids or innocent civilians interrupts our business-as-usual schedules. 

Despair manifests itself in our lives either through anger or apathy – the former belonging to those who feel as if they can change their circumstances (the zealots) and the latter belonging to those who do not (the hermits). Regardless of whether we cope with our collective despair through excessive association with the culture or merely withdraw from it, we are all held captive by the distractions of the “American Dream.” I find this “dream” to be a rather shallow fallacy that tries to sell us on the idea we can socially engineer the utopia marketed to us in every TikTok or TV ad. Further, the “dream” can only be fulfilled through more money, more consumerism, more entertainment, more vacations, and more accumulation. All the while, we lose our ability to discern when this “dream” becomes a nightmare, and our subscription to the culture comes to also require more labor and less rest, more surveillance and less social trust, more materialism and less spirituality, and perhaps most concerning, more commodity and less sanctity. 

Of course, the temptation here would be to shoot the messenger, but I hope I’ve convinced you at least partially that our nation and our people are sick, drowning in despair. It’s hard for me to accept that a culture that claims to be thriving, and especially one that claims to be as “Christian” as ours, would be as depressed, anxious, suicidal, homicidal, and polarized as our own. Despair has become a fundamental part of the American ethos, and we’ve blindly accepted its disastrous consequences in the name of individual liberty and freedom. However, you wouldn't know it by the way we have buried our heads in the sand of reality TV, the constant grind of hustle culture, the uncontrollable consumption of toys and trips, and so many echo chambers that it's a miracle we even know that the world doesn’t revolve around us. In the new Gilded Age, we've gotten really skilled at covering our despair in gloss and gold, but the thing about golden manure is it still smells and tastes like bullshit.

The real trouble with despair is that it is not only exhausting in the ways in which it constantly seeks distraction from the facts of life but is also dangerous, for those exact same reasons. Despair conditions us to live in a constant state of threat and panic, never knowing when the sky is actually falling. It should come as no surprise then that our culture continues to lose its capacity to incentivize neighborliness and instead, rewards those who accept the terms of a seemingly dog-eat-dog world. Such people learn that their own security, stability, and comfort are to be at the forefront of every decision. Consequently, we’ve come to define what it means to be a good American as one who is willing to do just about anything, including kill, steal, and destroy, to avoid the reality that life isn’t the way we want it to be. 

We've become so ensnared in our attachments to what makes us feel safe, those things that provide the illusion of safety and security, that we can't seem to recognize that we've never been more unsafe. We've worshiped militarism, carried our guns, and sought out potential foes to the point that we can only fathom sharing our lives, our tables, and even our pews with people who look and think exactly like us. This might sound safe, but it is no doubt the pinnacle of loneliness and isolation, which are breeding grounds for the radicalization of those who do not think twice about taking another life. We might like to take to Facebook to tell everyone "how crazy the world has become" when such tragedies happen, but we are deceived if we absolve ourselves of our war-struck culture by simply declaring blood could never be on our innocent hands. All of us are responsible for the world we live in. We may not pull the trigger, but we are certainly contributing to more and more social isolation and despair in our refusal to see each other the way God sees us. 

To state the danger of despair as clearly as I can, if we continue to sow despair and violence – particularly in the military industrial complex and gun lobby’s unholy marriage of war and profits and our unending wars of imperial conquest – on top of the soil of an intensely anxious, self-absorbed society, then we will most certainly continue to reap a backlash of violence from those who feel as if their life is absent of any meaning or hope. Assassination attempts, school shootings, massacres at houses of worship, and the like are no accident. Rather, they are byproducts of a culture sick with resentment, fear, and death. We are trapped, stuck in our collective grief, and unwilling to face our deepest anxieties and fears. We are drowning in despair.

The picture I’m trying to paint here is that there seems to be a strong correlation between a culture that relies upon the pacification of constant distraction to avoid their despair and their lack of hope. A people formed in the logics of self-gratification have no patience for hope, for the scope of hope’s power often lies beyond what we can see or even imagine. Simply, we are a culture who has grown to find hope, particularly an eternal hope, rather inconvenient to our daily lives. However, if we are to imagine the healing of our nation and world, cultivating a deep sense of hope will be necessary. 

While there may be times of urgency when we must pick sides and stand for what is right against all odds, I’d argue much of the human experience should be shaped by nuanced and loving interactions within life’s gray and complicated realities. Possessing eternal hope allows us to do that. The hope of Christ gives us permission not to defer the world’s serious and glaring problems until a later time but rather places them within the transcendent hands of God where those problems find their rightful place. In other words, Christian hope learns how to declare victory in defeat, rather than denying it, and how to declare resurrection while our communities are being crucified. Christian hope does not rely on quick fixes or DIY solutions to usher in the Kingdom of God but on the Spirit of God always at work in the world to reconcile all things back to Christ himself. As the Rev. William Barber II says in the documentary Bad Faith, “I’m not an optimist. No, I’m full of Christian hope, which looks at the despair, at the destruction, at the denials, and at the deceptions and says they are real but they don’t have to have the last say.” 

Paul’s description of Christian hope in 2 Corinthians 4 is also a great reminder that, for Christians, death may have the power to alter our lives in some capacity but the power of Christ is such that communion, restoration, and healing are always possible. Christ is the world’s living hope that resurrection always proceeds crucifixion. When I look around Appalachia, I see a great deal of crucifixion happening: a poor region being exploited for its cheap land and labor, communities devastated by an opioid epidemic, increasing homelessness and housing unaffordability, state politicians that are cutting our social safety nets while giving more and more money to corporations, and so much more. In raw honesty, there is a lot here for folks to despair about, and there isn’t much cause for optimism, especially considering the American corporate oligarchy has now assumed full political control without much accountability. Damningly, their sights are set more on colonizing Mars than housing Appalachians. And yet, “We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed…” My hope for our home and our region lies in our crucified Lord, knowing and trusting that he is and always has been living amongst and working through the crucified ones, those forgotten hillbillies roaming these hills, to realize Heaven in these mountains. 

Of the many important functions hope plays, its ability to restore Love to its proper place in our lives is paramount. The redemptive work of Christ is such that all those times and experiences that have broken and fragmented us are also the very things that connect us and make us whole. Ironically, we are made one through our despair. There is no cure for the universal suffering that comes with being human, but if we possess the courage to be vulnerable with one another, our suffering and despair become opportunities, gifts even, to bond us to our neighbors. And it is in that place of solidarity and togetherness that the world is made anew in the likeness of God’s love. 

While the fate of our country, as well as our region, hangs in the balance, I still believe there is cause for hope. I'd like to make the case that the best thing you can do to "save" our country is share a meal with your neighbors, friends and foes alike. While it is objectively true that the Republican and Democratic parties have vastly different definitions for what democracy, "We the People," and patriotism mean, we deceive ourselves if we think the only way forward is to accept their partisan terms for how we live our lives and how we are to interact with each other. If we aren't careful, they might have us convinced that the most important thing about us is how we vote every four years and not how we make a shared life with our neighbors in our neighborhoods, hollers, and communities. While it may be one of the most neglected institutions in American life today, your dinner table just might be the most radical place for healing to take place across our land.

Friends, we can deny our despair no longer. Our polarized country seems to be tearing apart at the seams, leaving us and our communities overwhelmed by impossible questions, paralyzing fear, and some mixture of deep grief and anger. Unfortunately, things are likely to get worse before they get better. And there may even come a time when our increasing distrust of one another becomes an impulse to harm, punish, or perhaps even kill one another. God knows it's happened in plenty of other places. May we not be so naïve to assume that it couldn't happen here. But regardless of how bad things may or may not get, we always have a choice. Just as God asked the prophet Micah, the Lord asks the faithful of every generation: what does the Lord require of us, even while we drown in despair?

No doubt, there will be those who answer by picking up their swords and shields to crusade around the world destroying the lives of any who stand in the way of their campaign to seize power and prosperity. But for those of us who have been healed, against all odds, in the crucifixion of God, may we be found amongst the despairing carnage of these times and choose, instead, to pick up our crosses and stubbornly find hope there.